Signed agreements

The NYT carried out its own test with an old Blackberry phone to illustrate the issue.

The handset ran an app called Hub, which was designed to collate information from a variety of social media platforms into one place.

The newspaper said the information collected by the software included the IDs, birthday dates, work details and educational histories of many of the journalists’ friends, as well as identifying information about many more friends-of-friends.

Image copyrightBlackberryImage captionThe Hub was one of the centrepiece features of the Blackberry 10 operating system

It said Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and Amazon were among others to have struck data-sharing agreements.

Facebook has responded with a blog headlined “Why we disagree with the New York Times”.

It defended its use of software tools called application programming interfaces (APIs), which it said had been developed to create “Facebook-like experiences” on smartphones at a time before use of its own mobile apps became commonplace.

“Given that these APIs enabled other companies to recreate the Facebook experience, we controlled them tightly from the get-go,” it states.

“These partners signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than to recreate Facebook-like experiences.

“Partners could not integrate the user’s Facebook features with their devices without the user’s permission. And our partnership and engineering teams approved the Facebook experiences these companies built.

“Contrary to claims by the New York Times, friends’ information, like photos, was only accessible on devices when people made a decision to share their information with those friends.”

The social network added that it was not aware of there being any abuse of the shared data.

Facebook began shutting down use of the APIs in April as part of its response to the Cambridge Analytica row. It said 22 of the partnerships had since ended.

Apple has confirmed it is among those to have stopped using the APIs, and said that it had mainly employed them to let users post pictures and other information without first having to open the Facebook app.

Image copyrightPAImage captionApple says it no longer makes use of the contested APIs on its iPhones

Microsoft told the NYT that all shared data involved was held locally on users’ phones and not copied to its servers.

Blackberry said it did not “collect or mine” Facebook data for its own use. It added that newer Blackberry-branded Android handsets do not use the APIs.

Amazon and Samsung have yet to comment.

‘Unworthy of trust’

Despite Facebook’s defence of its behaviour, one British digital rights campaign group has expressed concern.

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